The Dreamer (Ala Notable Children's Books. Older Readers)

• ISBN13: 9780439269704
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

“I suppose I ought to warn you at the outset that my present circumstances are puzzling, even to me. Nevertheless, I am sure of this much: My little story has become your history. You won’t really understand your times until you understand mine.”

So begins the account of Agnes Shanklin, the charmingly diffident narrator of Mary Doria Russell’s compelling new novel, Dreamers of the Day. And what is Miss Shanklin’s “little story?” Nothing less than the creation of the modern Middle East at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, where Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Lady Gertrude Bell met to decide the fate of the Arab worldâ€"and of our own.

A forty-year-old sch! oolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic, Agnes has come into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving at the Semiramis Hotel just as the Peace Conference convenes, Agnes, with her plainspoken American opinionsâ€"and a small, noisy dachshund named Rosieâ€"enters into the company of the historic luminaries who will, in the space of a few days at a hotel in Cairo, invent the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.

Neither a pawn nor a participant at the conference, Agnes is ostensibly insignificant, and that makes her a welcome sounding board for Churchill, Lawrence, and Bell. It also makes her unexpectedly attractive to the charismatic German spy Karl Weilbacher. As Agnes observes the tumultuous inner workings of nation-building, she is drawn more and more deeply into geopolitical intrigue and toward a personal awakening.

With ! prose as graceful and effortless as a seductive float down the! Nile, M ary Doria Russell illuminates the long, rich history of the Middle East with a story that brilliantly elucidates today’s headlines. As enlightening as it is entertaining, Dreamers of the Day is a memorable, passionate, gorgeously written novel.A panoramic yet intimate history of the American leftâ€"of the reformers, radicals, and idealists who have fought for a more just and humane society, from the abolitionists to Michael Moore and Noam Chomskyâ€"that gives us a revelatory new way of looking at two centuries of American politics and culture.

Michael Kazinâ€"one of the most respected historians of the American left working todayâ€"takes us from abolitionism and early feminism to the labor struggles of the industrial age, through the emergence of anarchists, socialists, and communists, right up to the New Left in the 1960s and ’70s. While the history of the left is a long story of idealism and determination, it has also been, in the traditional view, a sto! ry of movements that failed to gain support from mainstream America. In American Dreamers, Kazin tells a new history: one in which many of these movements, although they did not fully succeed on their own terms, nonetheless made lasting contributions to American society that led to equal opportunity for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals; the celebration of sexual pleasure; multiculturalism in the media and the schools; and the popularity of books and films with altruistic and antiauthoritarian messages.

Deeply informed, at once judicious and impassioned, and superbly written, American Dreamers is an essential book for our times and for anyone seeking to understand our political history and the people who made it.

From the time he is a young boy, Neftal\u00ed hears the call of a mysterious voice. Even when the neighborhood children taunt him, and when his harsh, authoritarian father ridicules him, and when he doubts himself, Neftal\u00ed kn! ows he cannot ignore the call. Under the canopy of the lush ra! in fores t, into the fearsome sea, and through the persistent Chilean rain, he listens and he follows. . . Combining elements of magical realism with biography, poetry, literary fiction, and sensorial, transporting illustrations, Pam Mu\u00f1oz Ryan and Peter S\u00eds take readers on a rare journey of the heart and imagination.

PRAISE FOR PAM MUNOZ RYAN:

\u0022Told in a lyrical, fairy tale-like style....Ryan fluidly juxtaposes world events with one family's will to survive.\u0022--Publishers Weekly, starred review, ESPERANZA RISING

\u0022Ryan writes a moving story in clear, poetic language that children will sink into, and the book offers excellent opportunities for discussion and curriculum support.\u0022 --Booklist, ESPERANZA RISING

\u0022Ebullient and tautly structured....With a pacing that moves along at a gallop, this is a skillful execution of a fascinating historical tale.\u0022--Publishers Weekly, starred review, RIDING FREEDOM

ADDITIONAL AW! ARDS AND HONORS FOR ESPERANZA RISING:

-Willa Cather Award

-Americas Award Honor Book

-Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

-NYPL 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing

-Smithsonian Notable Book

-Children's Literature Choice List

-Notable Books for a Global Society

-Jefferson Cup Award - Worthy of note

-Judy Goddard AZ Young Adult Author of the Year Award

-Judy Lopez Memorial Award

AWARDS AND HONORS FOR RIDING FREEDOM:

-California Young Reader Medal winner (Intermediate Category)

-IRA Teacher's Choice

-Parenting Magazine \u0022Reading Magic\u0022 Award winner

-Recognition of Merit for a First Novel Award - Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People

Choke

• ISBN13: 9780307388926
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Victor Mancini's a medical school dropout with a problem. He needs to pay for elder care for his mother, who's got Alzheimer's. So he comes up with the perfect scam: pretending to choke in upscale restaurants and getting “saved” by fellow diners who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, offer him financial support.Meanwhile, he cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops and spends his days working at Colonial Dunsboro, where his stoner colleagues are sentenced to the stocks for any deviation from the colonial lifestyle. Oh, yeah, and he's desperate to find the truth of his paternity, which his addled mother suggests may be divine.Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a med-s! chool dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. All of these statements about the protagonist of Choke are more or less true. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.

"Art never comes from happiness." So says Mancini's mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock-full of nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case. In the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus, and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he's settling for the Heimlic! h.

Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palahniuk terri! tory. It would be a pity to disclose the surprises of the plot, but suffice it to say that what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room, and, well, a little bit of Fight Club. Just as with Fight Club and the other two novels under Palahniuk's belt, we get a smattering of gloriously unflinching sound bites, including this skeptical bit on prayer chains: "A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around."

Whether this is the novel that will break Palahniuk into the mainstream is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy, "dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a little higher than we might wish. In the end, though, the author's nerve and daring pull the whole thing off--just barely. And what's next for Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he does in the final pa! ges: "Maybe it's our job to invent something better.... What it's going to be, I don't know." --Bob Michaels

Parenting Teenagers: Systematic Training for Effective Parenting of Teens

• ISBN13: 9780979554216
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

In this edgy thriller, Don McKay (Thomas Haden Church, Sideways) flees his hometown after a horrendous tragedy and vows never to return. But 25 years later he comes back to find a dark menace looming over the town. As he attempts to rekindle his romance with an old high school girlfriend (Elisabeth Shue, Leaving Las Vegas), Don is pulled into a malevolent world from which he may never escape.There's urban noir, like Night and the City, and suburban noir, like Double Indemnity. With Don McKay, Jake Goldberger puts his stamp on the latter, offering a sad-sack janitor (producer Thomas Haden Church), who returns to his East Coast hometown when he learns that his old girlfriend, Sonny (! Elisabeth Shue), has a terminal illness. Sonny, who spends her days in shiny negligees, wants to get back together, which suits Don just fine, though he has his doubts about Dr. Pryce (James Rebhorn), and Marie (Melissa Leo, stealing every scene), Sonny's live-in nurse, who both act more like jealous lovers than medical professionals. When Pryce tries to strangle Don, he kills the man in self-defense and hides the body, turning to his friend, Otis (Keith David), for help, since the police aren't likely to believe him due to the events of the past (Goldberger withholds the details until the end). In the meantime, Don puts up with Sonny's tempestuous seduction act until he can't take it anymore, but escaping her clutches proves unexpectedly difficult, especially once blackmailer Mel (Pruitt Taylor Vince) enters the scene. As in the melodramas of yore, characters say the most preposterous things, but Goldberger keeps you guessing as to their real motives. If he casts Church an! d Shue against type, that only deepens the central mystery, th! ough the star comes off better than his leading lady, who sometimes seems lost. Still, their talents ensure that the writer-director's debut doesn't slide into farce--though it sure comes close. --Kathleen C. FennessyIn this edgy thriller, Don McKay (Thomas Haden Church, Sideways) flees his hometown after a horrendous tragedy and vows never to return. But 25 years later he comes back to find a dark menace looming over the town. As he attempts to rekindle his romance with an old high school girlfriend (Elisabeth Shue, Leaving Las Vegas), Don is pulled into a malevolent world from which he may never escape.There's urban noir, like Night and the City, and suburban noir, like Double Indemnity. With Don McKay, Jake Goldberger puts his stamp on the latter, offering a sad-sack janitor (producer Thomas Haden Church), who returns to his East Coast hometown when he learns that his old girlfriend, Sonny (Elisabeth Shue), has a terminal illness. Sonny, who spends her! days in shiny negligees, wants to get back together, which suits Don just fine, though he has his doubts about Dr. Pryce (James Rebhorn), and Marie (Melissa Leo, stealing every scene), Sonny's live-in nurse, who both act more like jealous lovers than medical professionals. When Pryce tries to strangle Don, he kills the man in self-defense and hides the body, turning to his friend, Otis (Keith David), for help, since the police aren't likely to believe him due to the events of the past (Goldberger withholds the details until the end). In the meantime, Don puts up with Sonny's tempestuous seduction act until he can't take it anymore, but escaping her clutches proves unexpectedly difficult, especially once blackmailer Mel (Pruitt Taylor Vince) enters the scene. As in the melodramas of yore, characters say the most preposterous things, but Goldberger keeps you guessing as to their real motives. If he casts Church and Shue against type, that only deepens the central mystery, th! ough the star comes off better than his leading lady, who some! times se ems lost. Still, their talents ensure that the writer-director's debut doesn't slide into farce--though it sure comes close. --Kathleen C. FennessyOffers parents a realistic and practical approach to meeting the challenges of raising children today. Teaches effective and enjoyable ways to relate to children.An informative best-seller-updated with a new format and illustrations--with proven techniques for better parent-teen relationships.

Diving into Darkness: A True Story of Death and Survival

• iParenting Media Award for excellent product and Top Toy of the year from Creative Child magazine
• Indoor or outdoor
• comes with 4 rockets
• Refill rockets available

No one loses their mind instantly â€" Sanity seeps away one drop at a time. Yoshimi simply wanted a better life â€" for both herself and her daughter Ikuko. Unfortunately, such wishes may sometimes be hard to come by. The custody battle has grown embittered and hurtful, her new job is less than desirable, and Ikuko’s schoolwork has taken a turn for the worse. But, Yoshimi has something bigger to worry about. Something upstairs. Something cold and dank. Something that should have never been.Dark Water is Japanese horror auteur Hideo Nakata's return to the genre after his Ring cycle made you too scared to watch television ever again. Where Ringu dealt with a supernatural force wreaking re! venge via technology, this film is a much more traditional ghost story. After winning a custody battle for her daughter, single mother Yoshimi moves into what she thinks is the perfect apartment with her daughter Hitomi. No sooner have they unpacked than strange things begin to disturb their new life. A water leak from the supposedly abandoned apartment above gets bigger and bigger, a child's satchel reappears even though Yoshimi throws it away several times, and she is haunted by the image of a child wearing a yellow mackintosh who bears a striking resemblance to a young girl who disappeared several years before. The conventional narrative follows Yoshimi's increasingly desperate attempts to discover who or what force is haunting her daughter, but the story's execution is far from predictable. Nakata is the master of understated suspense: there's always a feeling of motiveless malignancy that runs like an undercurrent through his films--far more frightening than out and ou! t shocks--and here he also practically drowns his audience in ! water im agery. The film is saturated; the relentless dripping in the apartment, the constant rain outside and the deliberately washed-out photography make any color, such as the yellow coat, seem incongruous and unsettling. Nakata also clears the film of unnecessary characters--this is an almost deserted Tokyo--preferring to concentrate the action on Yoshimi's rising hysteria as she struggles to understand what is happening and how to save her daughter. Granted, the special effects are somewhat unconvincing and the ending confused, but even so the result is a stylish and disquieting chiller that will do for bathtubs what his Ring films did for video recorders. --Kristen Bowditch

Stomp® on the Launch Pad and a blast of air propels the Stomp Rocket® over 100 feet in the air! The kit comes with 4 glow in the dark foam rockets.  The Junior is designed for ages 3 and up.

Kids can get rid of some excess energy with this air-powered outdoor rocket toy. No battery or ! fuel is needed to get the rockets airborne--just some old-fashioned stomping power. Set up the simple launch stand in a clear outdoor area, connect the 38-inch-long vinyl air hose and blast pad, load one of the 9-inch yellow foam rockets--and watch out. Our 5-year-old assistant reviewer really got a kick out of jumping on the purple blast-off pad and watching her rockets soar 50 feet or more, though she had to fight the adults for a turn. If the three rockets included with the kit aren't enough fun, you can order stomp parachutes and spin copters from the manufacturer. --Marianne Painter

On New Year's Day, 2005, David Shaw traveled halfway around the world on a journey that took him to a steep crater in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa, a site known as Bushman's Hole. His destination was nearly 900 feet below the surface.
On January 8th he descended into the water. About fifteen feet below the surface was a fissure in the bottom of the basin,! barely wide enough to admit him. He slipped through the openi! ng and d isappeared from sight, leaving behind the world of light and life.
Then, a second diver descended through the same crack in the stone. This was Don Shirley, Shaw's friend, and one of the few people in the world qualified to follow where Shaw was about to go. In the community of extreme diving, Don Shirley was a master among masters.
Twenty-five minutes later, one of the men was dead. The other was in mortal peril, and would spend the next 10 hours struggling to survive, existing literally from breath to breath.
What happened that day is the stuff of nightmarish drama, but it’s also a compelling human story of friendship, heroism, ambition, and of coming to terms with loss and tragedy.

District B13

• In this action packed film set in the ghettos of Paris in 2010, an undercover cop and ex-thug try to infiltrate a gang in order to defuse a neutron bomb. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: FOREIGN Rating: NR Age: 876964000208 UPC: 876964000208 Manufacturer No: 10020

Paris 2010. An isolation wall surrounds the ghetto cities of district b13. Within these walls gang rule is absolte. Damien is a member of an elite police squad highly trained in martial arts. He goes undercover to infiltrate a gang in order to defuse a neutron bomb & save district b13 from annihilation. Studio: Magnolia Pict Hm Ent Release Date: 12/31/2007 Run time: 85 minutes Rating: RFor eye-popping kinetic thrills, District B13 tops the class. In the near future, the worst ghettos of Paris have been walled in and left to rot. When a neutron bomb gets stolen by a criminal kingpin in seedy District B13, Damien--a cop who sp! ecializes in deep cover assignments (Cyril Raffaelli, a stuntman turned actor)--has to team up with Leito (David Belle), who grew up in the district and has his own reason for going back: the kingpin kidnapped his sister (tough yet adorable gamine Dany Verissimo). The plot takes a few preposterous turns, but it's beside the point--every turn serves only to maintain the relentless flow of sheer physical prowess. Belle is one of the inventors of a sport called parkour, which treats a city's architecture like an obstacle course; while running from gun-toting thugs, Leito leaps, bounds, and scrambles up and down buildings with astonishing grace. The fight sequences are just as down-to-earth yet over-the-top as Damien whirls, kicks, and crunches through armies of bad guys. Just as important is the tongue-in-cheek tone that never turns smirky; the movie doesn't take itself seriously, but doesn't mock itself or its basic cinematic pleasures. Anyone looking for a break from ! the overbearing CGI and self-important pomp of Hollywood actio! n movies should watch District B13. --Bret Fetzer